Tokyo 2020: A Perfect Olympic Vision?

On Saturday, the International Olympic Committee announced that it had awarded the 2020 Summer Games to Tokyo, which also hosted in 1964. (And was supposed to host in 1940, until Japan invaded China and lost the Games, temporarily, to Helsinki, before the whole thing was cancelled as a result of the Second World War.) “The joy was even greater than when I won my own election,” Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe told reporters after hearing the news. Jacques Rogge, the outgoing president of the I.O.C., praised the city’s bid: “Tokyo has described itself as a safe pair of hands. As a surgeon, that is something that appeals to me.”

Cameras cut to jubilant crowds shouting “Banzai”: ninety per cent of the local population was said to be in support. (Japan also hosted the 1998 Winter Games at Nagano.) The bid projected total expenditures at a reasonable eight billion dollars or so, significantly lower than the nineteen billion that Istanbul, Tokyo’s closest competitor, planned to spend—and dramatically lower than the money spent by other recent hosts, thanks largely to the organizers’ plan to reuse existing structures located near the city center, and to the model public-transportation system Tokyo already has. The mockup for a renovated Olympic Stadium is striking, and has met with approval. Analysts have pointed to winning the Games as another sign of the robustness of so-called “Abenomics,” and the rejuvenation of the Japanese economy. The Japanese stock market was up on the news.

Tokyo may indeed offer the Olympic Movement safe hands, but, as Thomas Bach, who was elected on Tuesday to succeed Rogge as president of the I.O.C., has already acknowledged, there is something very wrong with the bidding process. For one thing, Tokyo’s jubilant post-announcement rhetoric is all rather familiar.

In 2007, after the I.O.C. announced its decision to award the 2014 Winter Games to Sochi, Vladimir Putin, who had made his country’s final pitch to the committee, said: “This means not only that Russia’s prominent standing in sports has been recognized but also that Russia itself has been recognized as a country.” Jacques Rogge praised the country’s tradition of sporting excellence and its readiness to host the Games. Cameras cut to jubilant crowds: ninety per cent of Russians were said to approve of hosting the Games. The accepted bid had pegged total costs at roughly twelve billion dollars. Six years later, the total cost is estimated at more than fifty billion, with perhaps as much of half that figure having been lost to corruption. There are concerns about weather, security, and about how Russia’s new anti-gay legislation might affect visitors and athletes. Putin has banned any public protests for a period before and after the event.

In 2009, after the I.O.C. awarded the 2016 Summer Games to Rio, the Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who was at times in tears, said: “From the bottom of my heart, I should say this is the most emotional day in my life. Rio deserves it, and Brazil deserves it.” Rogge said that the city’s bid was faultless. Nearly seventy per cent of Brazilians were said to approve. Costs were estimated at fourteen billion dollars. Four years later, the budget has been revised upward by at least seven hundred million dollars, and the construction of venues has fallen behind schedule, prompting skepticism from the I.O.C. about the country’s readiness. This summer, when nearly a million Brazilians took to the streets to protest their government’s economic policies, its plan to host the Olympics (as well as the 2014 World Cup, with its own thirteen-billion-dollar price tag) became a central target of their outrage.

Neither Sochi nor Rio is yet a lost cause, of course. The Games will arrive on schedule and, barring something truly shocking, they will, as they do, go on. But both have contributed to a souring public perception of the civic utility of the hosting the Olympics. Study after study on the matter has already shown that the Olympics very rarely bring long-term economic benefits to a host city; best cases merely break even—and short-term benefits like increased tourism are generally overstated. This is a sensitive point for the Olympic Movement. When the I.O.C. sent its representatives to check in on Rio last week, one of their biggest criticisms was not that the city was spending too much money but instead that it had a p.r. problem: organizers had failed to get Brazilians more excited about hosting the Games.

Is there a solution? This week, Bach, the new I.O.C. president, who was a gold medalist in fencing for Germany in 1976, told the BBC:

We could take a different approach by saying to candidates, “How do you imagine sustainable Olympic Games in your city?”, “How does it fit with your development plan—with regards to transport, infrastructure and social issues?”

Yet Bach’s position as a reformer may be undercut by the public support offered to his candidacy, in violation of I.O.C. bylaws, by Sheikh Ahmed Al-Fahad Al-Sabah, who is a member of Kuwait’s royal family and president of the Association of National Olympic Committees.

By rewarding Tokyo’s seemingly restrained plan to host a more modest Olympics, the I.O.C. may be signalling its desire to move away from the kinds of nationalistic, gaudy, and transformative Olympic Games represented by Beijing, in 2008, and Sochi, which, combined, have made for a trillion dollars in spending. (Even London 2012, praised as a pared-down affair after China’s 2008 super-spectacular, spent more than twice what it proposed in its winning bid.) Both Tokyo and another finalist for 2020, Madrid, emphasized the infrastructure they already had rather than promise grand futuristic towers. Perhaps more bids will copy this blueprint going forward.

Meanwhile, 2020 is a long way off, and there are unanswered questions facing Tokyo. Most troubling are lingering concerns about the environmental fallout from the Fukushima nuclear disaster. Prime Minister Abe has promised that leaking radioactive water from the site poses no danger to Tokyo or to its potential visitors now or seven years hence. Also, Tokyo has said that, in addition to refurbishing old venues, the city will be building many new ones as well; past Olympics have revealed that construction on any scale can quickly strain budgets.

A few weeks ago, in response to the mounting concerns about the upcoming Winter Olympics at Sochi, I proposed that the Olympics needed a truly radical overhaul: that the expensive and uncertain model of floating the Games from city to city should be replaced by two permanent sites, one cold and one warm, and both called Olympia. Such a thing will almost surely never happen. But if we can’t have the twin Olympias, then perhaps Tokyo is the next best thing: a city prepared for the challenges of hosting an international spectacle, and modest enough to shape the Olympics to fit a city rather than reshape a city to fit the Olympics.